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Top 15 Nomadic Footballers

There are some players who remain religiously loyal to their club throughout their careers. Epitomized by the likes of Ryan Giggs, Francesco Totti and Matt Le Tissier, one-club men are a dying breed, and most modern players play for a multitude of teams. However, some players take that to an extreme. Whilst playing for five or six clubs is practically the norm in the modern game, playing for 15 or 16 is a different matter.

These nomadic players who seemingly make a career out of moving from one club to another are often referred to as 'journeymen'. Some see the term as simply meaning a player who moves around regularly, although others would argue that it carries negative connotations. With it, perhaps, comes suggestions of being unloyal, a mercenary, having a tendency to suffer a drop off in form, fall out with people or become unsettled at their current club.

Whilst there is no definitive term for how many clubs a player must turn out for before being labelled a 'journeyman', one would suggest that any player whose list of teams gets into the double digits could fairly safely pick up the tag. Meanwhile, every player on this list made switching from one club to another into an art form. The caliber isn't really a focus of this list, but rather just the sheer amount of times these players have moved around. Here are the top 15 nomadic footballers.

8 Drewe Broughton

7 Frank Worthington

6 Richard Pacquette

5 John Burridge

via premierleague.com

4 Trevor Benjamin

Action Images / Richard Heathcote

3 Lutz Pfannenstiel

via theguardian.co.uk

2 Jefferson Louis

via telegraph.co.uk

1 Rudi Gutendorf

via tz.de

Bizarrely, top of this list, is a nomadic manager, not a player. Ironically, as a player, Gutendorf was a one-club man, spending his entire career at TuS Koblenz. As a manager though, the German was a nomad of epic proportions. Gutendorf has managed 18 different national teams and 15 different club teams, between 1955 and 2003. His work has taken him to Chile, Bolivia, Nepal (twice), Botswana, New Caledonian, Tanzania, Mauritius, Rawanda, Samoa, Iran and many other countries. In 2013, Gutendorf said he was looking to get back into management but the chairman doubted his ability at the age of 86; two years later, Gutendforf seems no closer to landing a job.